Born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.

About Me

Rafael Jesús González, born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, he has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland (where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.)
He has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was Poet in Residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under the Poets & Writers “Writers on Site” award in 1996. He served as contributing editor for The Montserrat Review and received the Annual Dragonfly Press Award for Literary Achievement in 2002. In 2003 he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English & Annenberg/CPB for his writing. In June 2007, he was honored for excellence in poetry at the 20th World Congress of Poets, Montgomery, Alabama.

The scorpion-----in its opal eyes-----guards the secrets-----of the immobile water.It tenaciously raises its tail of iron& its topaz sting reflectsthe red lights of Mars,----the dark lights of Pluto.It hides behind the erect pole,---in the moist cave;it knows the secrets of the soul.

-October
12 is a feast-day known in various regions and times by many names:
Columbus Day, Discovery Day, Hispanic Culture Day, Day of the Americas,
Day of the Race, Day of the Indigenous Peoples.

In Mexico in 1928 at the insistence of the philosopher José Vasconcelos,
then Minister of Education, it was named Día de la Raza (Day of the
Race), denomination of the Iberian-American Union in 1913 to declare a
new identity formed by the encounter of the Spaniards with the native
peoples of the Americas. In 1902, the Mexican poet Amado Nervo had written a poem in honor of the President Benito Juárez (a Zapoteca Indian), which he read in the House of Representatives, titled La Raza de Bronce
(Race of Bronze) praising the indigenous race, title which later in
1919 the Bolivian author Alcides Arquedas would give his book. Bronze
(noble metal amalgamated of various metals) came to be metaphor for mestizaje
(the mixing of the races.) According to the thinking of Vasconcelos, a
Cosmic Race, the race of the future, is the noble race that is formed
in the Americas since October 12, 1492, the race of mestizaje,
an amalgam of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Europeans,
the Africans, the Asians, the world — in a word, the human race made
of a mixture of all the races which Vasconcelos called the Cosmic
Race.

But
that this race is formed at great cost to the indigenous American
peoples (and to the African peoples brought here as slaves) cannot be
ignored. Since 2002, in Venezuela the feast-day is called Día de la
Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance.)

Be
that as it may, by whatever name we give it, however way we cut it,
it is the same cake — the date commemorates the arrival of the
Europeans to America (which for them was a “new world”), not a visit
but an invasion, a genocide, a subjugation of the peoples of that “new
world” which we know today by the name of a European cartographer who
barely set foot on the sacred ground of the continents that bear
his name. What the date marks is a continuous colonization,
exploitation, abuse, outrage of the indigenous peoples of the Americas
that has scarcely lessened, that has persisted these five-hundred and
twenty-some years.

It
could well be called Day of Globalization. Since that date, the Earth
is concretely, definitively proven to be truly round, a sphere, a
ball, a globe. And from that date is imposed by force upon the
indigenous American peoples a quite strange
cosmology, attitude toward life, toward the Earth, toward economics,
toward the sacred, toward the human being him/herself — a single truth
narrow and intolerant, a rapacious disdain toward the Earth seen only
as a resource to be exploited, a concept of progress difficult to
distinguish from greed and the lust for power.

The
cause of the indigenous peoples screams for justice: their lands,
their fields continue to be stolen from them, destroyed for their
valuable woods and minerals; their agricultural creations, such as
maize and the potato, which have saved a great part of the world from
famine, are modified at the molecular level and controlled by
rapacious corporations; their traditional medicines are patented by
those same corporations; sacred water is privatized and stolen from
them; even their right to their own beliefs and cultures is not
respected. Even putting justice aside, we should all ally ourselves
with the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and of the entire world)
in their resistance against such abuse because what threatens them
threatens us all throughout the whole world — and the Earth itself.
They have a very much to teach us about a healthy relationship of
humankind with the Earth.

In
an Earth much smaller and more fragile than we imagined, we find
ourselves in full globalization and struggle against the imposition of
an unbridled capitalism and the fascism, its logical extension, that
accompanies it. The indigenous resistance that has never ceased these
five and a quarter centuries and some continues in spite of a brutal repression and
now all of us of the cosmic race, of pure necessity, must align
ourselves with their struggle, for that struggle is ours if we are to
survive on the Earth, holy mother of our race, the human race — and of
all our relations, the other animals, the plants, the minerals. On the
round, seamless Earth all borders are fictitious and what threatens
one threatens all. To think otherwise is not only immoral but insane.

Brother Francis, many must have seen you as a simpleton talking to the birds, befriending the wolf, pitying the rabbit and the fish. Of such fools do we make glory ----------on the Earth. Now fool is he who does not seeour brotherhood with the other animals, ------with the trees and grasses, ------------with the rocks and pebbles. Only by knowing this will we save -------I do not say our soul -------------but our dear ass.